The mother of the December 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder victim has hit out at senior lawyer Indira Jaising for asking her to forgive the four men, who are on death row for committing the brutal crime against her daughter.The mother was reacting to Indira Jaising’s tweet on Friday.“Who is Indira Jaising to give me such a suggestion? The whole country wants the convicts to be executed. Just because of people like her, justice is not done with rape victims,” she was quoted as saying by news agency.
“I can’t believe how Indira Jaising even dared to suggest such this. I met her many times over the years in the Supreme Court, not once did she ask for my wellbeing and today she is speaking for convicts. Such people earn a livelihood by supporting rapists, hence rape incidents don’t stop,” she said.
Jaising had tweeted the request soon after the mother had said she felt “betrayed” after a court in Delhi deferred the date of the execution of the four convicts from January 22 to February “While I fully identify with the pain of Asha Devi I urge her to follow the example of Sonia Gandhi who forgave Nalini and said she didn’t not want the death penalty for her. We are with you but against the death penalty (sic),” Jaising had tweeted.
The lawyer was referring to Nalini, who was arrested and convicted for her role in the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 allegedly by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).The 23-year-old woman’s mother broke down on Friday after the court set the new date for hanging the four convicts.“Humein bas tareekh pe tareekh mil rahi hai (We are only getting date after date)… I do not know what to feel anymore. We are only being given dates and pushed from one courtroom to the other,” she had said.The four convicts — Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma — were among the six men who brutally gang-raped the paramedical student on a moving bus on December 16, 2012, and pushed her out of the vehicle.She later succumbed to her injuries at a Singapore hospital on December 29.Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma were convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.One of the convicts was a juvenile and let off after serving three years in a reform home and the other allegedly committed suicide in jail.